Missing Piece

by Robert Priest

  Tharfen thought for a moment. “Well, now, I’m remembering that when I tried to separate those spellbinders by the Great Kone I touched them and a charge shot up into me and that was when it happened — that was when I first knew it was an actual piece again.”

  “And who knows what spell they were casting.”

  “I think it was a spell to bring back Vallaine, the man with the red hand.”

  “From the dead?”

  “Yes. I think he touched me, and that’s what caused the big jolt.”

  “And you know he is a middle magician?”

  “I did hear that. That is astounding. So that touch—”

  Mr. Stilpkin finished the thought for her: “Mediated the thaumatological charge of at least one of the spells in you.”

  Tharfen blanched. “If it was right at that moment that the piece became solid again, then—”

  “Then Vallaine is working on that Spell of General Return. That makes sense. And I’d bet the spell the one- eyed mages were casting was another Spell of General Return on him. And one effect of all this is that it has caused that piece in you to manifest.”

  “That is sick. That makes me want to vomit.”

  “I understand. But vomiting, my dear, would not be enough.”

  “Well what can we do?”

  “There are two ways of going about it. One way is to treat the mind and body separately, as though they were in a sense two mages locked in the conflict of their spell and spell-cross. I use reasoning and empathy to reach a kind of compromise. For instance, we have an elderly patient here who was born a girl-child, but her parents wanted a male heir, so they had a mage cast a spell to turn her into a boy. When he grew up, he got a mage to recite a spell that would switch his gender back, but halfway through the change came the spell fire and it got stalled and the two spells became crossed. As a result he was physically both a man and a woman for fifty years. Terribly unhappy. But by addressing the blocked nexus of the two spells, we have now reached something of a compromise, so that he spends one day as a woman and the next as a man.”

  “I see. Or?”

  “Or what?”

  “You said there were two ways.”

  “Or we could go at it mechanistically and see if we might be able to put physical, chemical, or magnetic forces of nature at work on the two of you to—”

  “The two of us?”

  “Oh, yes, my dear. This can’t be balanced on one side alone. Either way.”

  “So you’re saying…?”

  “I’m saying that if your problem is based on a major spell-cross between you and whoever this young man is, then you will not be able to rectify that problem without his participation. Absolutely.”

  “Then we are blocked.”

  “What do you mean we’re blocked?”

  “I mean that he’s not going to help me. Because he hates me.”

  “You don’t know that. Why don’t we have him brought here and see?”

  “Because … we are blocked again. Because nobody knows where he is. Because he’s Xemion of Ilde.” She nodded as he stared at her, taking in this revelation.

  “Well, isn’t that interesting. He hasn’t been seen for five years, and neither were you until just recently, and now suddenly just as the Great Kone is completing its first full turn, you are back here and he is being seen again, and all that unfinished crisscross between you is—”

  “One thing that’s not blocked is hate. I hate him and he hates me!”

  “Hate? Are you sure there was never anything … ah, more between you?”

  Tharfen looked at Mr. Stilpkin quite irritably. She answered seriously. “When me and my brothers were ragged little children, he used to dress up in all these colourful costumes that he got from some place where he lived in the forest and he would stand on a stump in a clearing and spout all these stories as though they were his stories. All full of himself, like a little lamprey snot barnacle thinking it’s the mighty ship it sucks. And sometimes we played at swordfights and I was the only girl until Saheli came along, so I would always be the maiden or the princess. And of course that is very impressive to a little girl, but …”

  “But what?”

  “But I soon saw him for what he truly is.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Someone who would deliberately rap a little girl’s knuckles extra hard in a play fight to see if he could make her cry. A pig, a liar, a thief.”

  “You left out one thing.”

  “What?”

  “He is also, quite possibly, if what many people say is true, a great natural spellbinder, and that means the importance of this is well beyond whatever is between you and him. We are all in grave danger here and I think this cross-spell is what’s at the very heart of it.”

  “Well, where is he then? Everybody said he was dead, but he obviously is not dead. He obviously must still abide somewhere nearby.”

  “Let’s remember something, Tharfen. Both of the spells you have upon you, he has upon him. And possibly many more if the way my hand is vibrating right now is to be relied upon. I suspect if he isn’t found soon, he will just show up. He will be drawn to you again by the same forces that draw you to him.”

  30

  An Underground Consensus

  Lirodello with three bulky Thrall soldiers led all fifty members of the council down a set of stone steps beneath the bottom-most dungeon of the castle. The bright lights of the torches bent into the stone stairway as though the flagstone had been a vent that, having been lifted, let the air in. Somewhere deeper down in the limestone the mechanisms made by long-ago stonemasons still did their work, refreshing the air, exchanging the air. With Lirodello leading the way, the group descended the spiralling increments of stone until they emerged into a dark chamber so vast that their torchlights did not touch its perimeters. It was very humid and they were glad that the air rushing down the stairwell continued to flow. Lirodello led them to where the torchlight illuminated many large wooden boxes stacked row on row.

  “When I was the quartermaster,” he said, “many things were brought to me to be disposed of. Whenever I needed to, I burned things. The things in these boxes down here, though, are dangerous, and I did not dare burn them because I was warned that some were designed to be activated by fire.”

  He had two of the burly Thralls lift one of the triangular-shaped boxes onto a stone table. The box was about three feet high and two feet wide, and the light from the torch showed it to be full to the top with what looked to be long triangles of paper.

  “Some of you may recognize these,” he said. He lifted out one of the pieces of paper by the tip and held it up before them, shaking it a little so a wave ran through it. “Just before the spell fire there were thousands and thousands of these. They were cheap to make, mass-printed, dictionary-based, and …” Lirodello put a little pressure on the edges of the triangle and it buckled into a cone shape. He held it up before them and turned it so they could see that a spiral of lettering began at the upper rim and was written around and down the cone so that the last letter of the last word ended exactly at the bottom-most point of the cone. Some of the older council members who had been alive fifty years ago in the Era of Common Magic were by now eyeing the object with great offence, even hatred, remembering the role these devices had reputedly played in the downfall of and subjugation of the Phaer Isle.

  “That is one part,” Lirodello said, “and here’s the other.” He lifted another triangle-shaped object from the same box and they saw that it was a tightly folded contraption made up of a number of small flat sticks attached to each other by various small hinges. “Now watch,” Lirodello said. He rotated four of the sticks downward to form four legs. With a second movement he swivelled various other sticks out of their original positions until they formed a cone-shaped frame. He swivelled out another stick and a smaller on
e on the end of it to form a crank handle on one side of the frame. Sarabin was eyeing the assemblage of the spell kone with some alarm. Lirodello inserted the pointed end of the cone into the framework, where it stood neatly mounted on its four legs.

  “Now if I were to turn the crank handle, this small flake of crystal you see here is the witness stone.” He held the contraption up and pointed to a small point of light glinting above the first letter of the spell at the top edge of the kone. “As the spell kone turns, the eye descends, keeping pace with the downward spiral of the letters all the way to the bottom of the kone. And that is how the spell is executed.”

  “We are well aware of the existence of day kones, Lirodello. Now what is your purpose in showing them to us?”

  “I would ask you to listen to me and agree to hear me out, as this is a matter of great import.” There were definitely grumbles among the Loceklians, but the majority seemed to agree. Lirodello instructed the three Thralls to each construct a kone from one of the boxes nearby. “Now first, for those who have not heard about these devices, please be aware that they are reliant upon a brief and insubstantial thaumatological force and that, in general, their products last only one day. This is why they were called day kones. Now, I think we all agree we find ourselves in a most dire moment in our history. Surely by the equinox the wind will turn and those Cyclopes tormentors will be flung at us with all the force of a hurricane and our city will be swarmed, sacked, and destroyed. Yet if we could repair our battlements, our chances of preventing them from even entering our city would be increased tenfold, I think we all agree. We have a gaping hole in our defences and not the capacity to fix it. And not for want of workmen, but for want of tools. We need axes and hammers. We need chisels and levels, because even the greatest stonemason cannot shape stone without a chisel. So here, then, with your indulgence and your patience, I ask you to witness without judgment.”

  Before anyone could object, the largest of the Thralls placed a nail near the bottom of her spell kone and turned the crank. As it revolved, the crystal eye descended straight down, keeping pace with the descent of the spiralling spell written on the outside of the kone. When the eye reached the bottom of the kone and the spell was witnessed, the nail at the bottom of the kone was suddenly transformed into a chisel. There were gasps all around and the Loceklians particularly let their objections be known. “Gentlemen, ladies,” Lirodello shouted forcefully. “As I said, if this were not the direst of emergencies—”

  “I will not have it! I will not intersect with such a crisscross as this,” Pryland, one of the most powerful Loceklians on the council, protested. “I would sooner die with all our culture.”

  This statement was punctuated by a momentous boom from the top of the stairs that caused a number of the counsellors to start with fear. Till then, the steady breeze had been flowing through the immense underground chamber, its progress manifest in the steady bend of the flames atop the torches. But now the breeze stopped and the flames straightened. “Oh, don’t worry,” Lirodello assured them. “I instructed that the door be closed to assure the complete privacy of our deliberations. My women here are quite sufficient to lifting it when we want to leave, aren’t you?” The three immense Thralls in question nodded as the bright flames from the three torches continued to rise straight up from their fuel.

  “Now,” Lirodello went on as though no one there had the slightest concern about suddenly being locked into this underground chamber, “as I have told you, the magic involved in making these day kone chisels is frail — in other words, brief — but they are, at least while they are here, as present and material as anything is. In other words, a chisel harvested from a day kone is still a chisel as long as it lasts, and whatever it chisels remains chiselled after it’s gone, if you get my meaning.”

  It was hard for the adherents of Loceklis not to protest as Lirodello continued.

  “And if, like me, you’re thinking about the many stonemasons without tools who are among us and how we need them and could use them on the battlements, then you’re probably asking ‘but what good is a chisel without a hammer,’ so …” He gestured to the second of the soldier Thralls who now slowly turned the crank on her spell kone. When it was done, the nail that she had placed near the bottom of the kone had been turned into a very solid-looking iron hammer. One of the Loceklians shouted “No” at this, but Lirodello ignored him. “Show them that it is solid,” Lirodello ordered. The well-muscled Thrall took the hammer and went down on one knee to the stone floor. Silhouetted by the flickering light of the torches, she raised the hammer in her massive right arm and brought it down with great force upon the floor so that the sound reverberated in the vast space and the flames quivered atop their torches. Again there were numerous gasps.

  Lirodello stood before them, smiling. “Yes, I know this is a bit shocking to see for the first time,” he said. “But I think you understand the great necessity that requires me to put it to you—”

  “Put what to us?”

  “I think we know what I am saying here, and why I am saying it,” he said firmly.

  “If you’re talking about using these things, we need consensus,” Pryland said.

  “I agree,” Lirodello said. “We must have consensus, and I assure you we will not be leaving this chamber until we have it.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry, we will not run out of air. This chamber was well vented by our ancestors.” He turned to face the mass of the council members so that his face was fully lit. “No one has been more against the spellcraft than I. I’ve spent five years rooting it out wherever I could. But now we are at a time when it is all around us. The Great Kone, Mr. Stilpkin tells us, is nearing what is called a great turn and—”

  “You might have hammers and chisels and stonemasons,” Pryland interrupted, “but how are you going to feed those stonemasons? We have sufficient food to feed a thousand people for two weeks, but we have twenty thousand mouths to feed.”

  “Well, that brings us to the natural next step, if we can agree on this first step.”

  “What first step?” one of the Loceklians asked.

  “Simply put, the first step is that to prevent the great evil of us all being murdered or enslaved by Cyclopes and our culture and history being forever wiped off the face of the Earth, we accept the much lesser evil of using these strange contraptions of our ancestors to get us through this very difficult time.”

  Now that it was openly stated, there was uproar. The ensuing discussion went on for several hours and grew ever more heated. Eventually there began to be complaints of hunger.

  “I think we will have to resume this discussion tomorrow in our regular chambers,” Pryland said.

  “I wish we had the luxury of that much time,” was Lirodello’s reply, “but I’m afraid we don’t. Nor will we have for much longer the luxury of eating if we don’t do something soon. We barely have enough to feed ourselves, let alone the great influx of people who every day swells our ranks.”

  With that, he had a fourth torch lit so that it suddenly grew brighter. He took the crank handle of the first kone he had assembled. The council grew quiet as he placed a little bit of a biscuit near the bottom of the kone and slowly turned the handle.

  “As the eye goes down, the words go round, all in one turn, the spell is bound.”

  For a while after the turning of the kone nothing happened. Everyone looked on in suspense. They smelled it before they beheld it — the delicious scent of roast beef and pudding. The fragrant aroma quickly permeated the chamber and some of the Loceklians found themselves salivating despite their objections. Suddenly, where the piece of dried biscuit had been there appeared a steaming plate containing thick slabs of roast beef. Beside it there was a long dish full of gravy. And beside that was another dish heaped with small, well-browned popover puddings and a pile of peas.

  “Now there is, I hope the Loceklians
will be happy to hear, no crossing of spells here. This is a one-way, one-time, day-long, dictionary-based spell and it has one result that is not in conflict with itself but is absolute. Here before you is an absolute roast beef dinner. Would any of you like to taste it?” Despite the tempting aroma, no one took him up on it. “Nobody?” They looked at one another but nobody stepped forward for the taste test.

  “Well, it’s a shame to let it go to waste,” Lirodello said with a smile. At this, he lifted one of the strips of steaming beef delicately, trailed it through the glistening gravy, and then, cupping his hand beneath it so that it didn’t drip, lifted it to his lips where he softly sucked it into his mouth and with a delighted lift of his eyebrows began to chew. “So good, so absolutely good,” he said. He took another strip and did likewise as they all looked on. When he’d finished, he took the plate and offered it to Pryland. Pryland turned up his nose, offended, but the next person didn’t hesitate to lift a strip to his lips. His face was likewise lit up with an expression of great pleasure. “Oh my, that is so good.”

  Lirodello gestured into the spacious darkness where occasionally, as the flames flickered, one could see the dark angles of many other boxes row on row. “This food has only the nutrition of the piece of biscuit it was made from, but you feel full when you eat it. If we can get through the next two weeks, even if it’s by eating this rather delicious stuff, I think we will then have a chance of getting through altogether.”

  “It seems a small price to pay,” said the man who was still chewing his strip of beef. A number of the others now zeroed in on the heaping plate and soon all the strips of beef were gone. When two or three others were left empty-handed, Lirodello said, “Well, it’s not going to do any more harm if more of you eat.” And he had already, unknown to them, prepared a number of other day-long food kones, which he now spun, distributing the resulting plates amongst the people there. There was such approval, such delight, such gusto in this food that, after a lean winter and an even leaner spring of eating little but preserves and grain, everyone, even Pryland, finally succumbed to it.